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Mitigation: Pointer-based Touch and Stylus Support

  • Article

WPF applications that target the .NET Framework 4.7 and are running on Windows starting with Windows 10 Creators Update can enable an optional WM_POINTER-based WPF touch/stylus stack.

Impact

Developers who do not explicitly enable pointer-based touch/stylus support should see no change in WPF touch/stylus behavior.

The following are current known issues with the optional WM_POINTER-based touch/stylus stack:

  • No support for real-time inking.

    While inking and stylus plugins still work, they are processed on the UI thread, which can lead to poor performance.

  • Behavioral changes due to changes in promotion from touch/stylus events to mouse events.

    • Manipulation may behave differently.

    • Drag/Drop will not show appropriate feedback for touch input. (This does not affect stylus input.)

    • Drag/Drop can no longer be initiated on touch/stylus events.

      This can potentially cause the application to become unresponsive until mouse input is detected. Instead, developers should initiate drag and drop from mouse events.

Opting in to WM_POINTER-based touch/stylus support

Developers who wish to enable this stack can add the following to their application's app.config file.

<configuration>
    <runtime>
        <AppContextSwitchOverrides value="Switch.System.Windows.Input.Stylus.EnablePointerSupport=true"/>
    </runtime>
</configuration>

Removing this entry or setting its value to false turns this optional stack off.

See also